A Mistake

In India, we lived in two concrete rooms on the roof of a house. The bathroom stood separate from the living quarters. The sink was attached to one of the exterior walls. Each night, my father would stand before the sink, the sky above him full of stars, and brush his teeth until his gums bled. Then he would spit the blood into the sink and turn to my mother and say, “Death, Shuba, death. No matter what we do, we will all die.”

“Yes, yes, beat drums,” my mother said once. “Tell the newspapers, too. Make sure everyone knows this thing you have discovered.” Like many people of her generation, those born before Independence, my mother viewed gloom as unpatriotic. To complain was to show that you were not willing to accept difficulties, that you were not willing to do the hard work that was needed to build the country.

My father was only two years older than my mother. Unlike her, he saw dishonesty and selfishness everywhere. Not only did he see these things but he believed that everybody else did, too, and that people were deliberately not acknowledging what they saw.

My mother’s irritation at his spitting blood he interpreted as hypocrisy.

My father was an accountant. He had wanted to immigrate to the West ever since he was in his early twenties, ever since America liberalized its immigration policies in 1965. His wish rose out of self-loathing. Often when he walked down the street in Delhi, he would feel that the buildings he passed were indifferent to him, that he mattered so little to them that he might as well not have been born. Because he attributed this feeling to his circumstances—and not to the fact that he was the sort of person who sensed buildings’ having opinions—he believed that if he were somewhere else, especially somewhere where he was paid in dollars and thus was rich, he would be a different person and one whose life had meaning.

Another reason he wanted to emigrate was that he saw the West as glamorous with the excitement of science. In India in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, radios, televisions, and cars were not just expensive objects but seen as almost supernatural. I remember that when we turned on the radio in our apartment, as the vacuum tubes warmed up, first the voices would sound far away and then they would rush at us, and this was thrilling, as if the machine were making some special effort for us.

Of everybody in my family, my father loved science the most. He tried to bring it into his life by going to medical clinics and having his urine tested. He loved clinics and doctors’ offices. Of course, hypochondria had something to do with this; my father suspected that there was something wrong with him and that it might be something physical. Also, sitting in the clinics and talking to doctors in lab coats, he felt that he was close to important things, that what the doctors were doing was the same as what doctors would do in England or Germany or America, that he was already there in those foreign countries.

My mother had no interest in emigrating for herself. She was a high-school economics teacher, and she liked her job. But she thought that the West would provide me and my brother, Birju, with opportunities.

Then came the Emergency. Indira Gandhi suspended the Constitution and put thousands of politicians and journalists in jail. My parents, like almost everyone who had seen Independence come, were very loyal; they were the sort of people who looked up at a cloud and thought, That’s an Indian cloud. After the Emergency, however, they began to think that even though they were ordinary and unlikely to get into political trouble, it might still be better to emigrate.

I used to assume that my father had been assigned to us by the government. This was because he appeared to serve no purpose. When he got home in the evening, all he did was sit in his chair in the living room, drink tea, and read the paper. Often he looked angry. By the time we left for America, when I was eight and Birju was twelve, I knew that the government had not assigned him to live with us. Still, I continued to think that he served no purpose.

My father, who had gone to America a year before us, was waiting for us in the arrivals hall at the airport. He was leaning against a metal railing and looking irritated. The sight of him made me anxious.

The apartment he had rented was in a tall, brown brick building in Queens. The gray metal front door swung open into a foyer with a wooden floor. Beyond this was a living room with a reddish-brown carpet that went from wall to wall. I had never seen a carpet, except in movies. Birju and my parents walked across the foyer and into the living room. I went to the carpet’s edge and stopped. A brass strip held the carpet to the floor. I took a step forward, trying not to put my weight down. I felt as if I were stepping onto a painting.

My father took us to the bathroom to show us toilet paper and hot water. Whereas my mother was interested in status—in being better educated than others or being considered more respectable—my father was simply interested in having more things. I think this was because while both of my parents had grown up poor, my father’s childhood had been more desperate. At some point, my father’s father had begun to believe that thorns were growing out of his palms. He had taken a razor and picked at his hands until they were shaggy with scraps of skin. Because of my grandfather’s problems, my father had grown up feeling that no matter what he did people would look down on him. As a result, he cared less about trying to convince people of his merits and more about just possessing things.

The bathroom was narrow. It had a tub, a sink, and a toilet in a row along one wall. My father reached between Birju and me and turned on the tap. Hot water came shaking and steaming into the basin. He stepped back and looked at us to gauge our reaction.

I had never seen hot water coming from a tap before. In India, in the winter, my mother used to get up early to heat pots of water on the stove so that we could bathe. Watching the hot water spill out, as if there were an endless supply, I had the sense of being in a fairy tale, one of those stories with a jug that is always full of milk or a bag of food that never empties.

That night, I went to bed on a mattress in the living room—the apartment had one bedroom, where my parents slept. Even in my sleep I was aware that I was in America. As the days passed, the wealth of this new country continued to astonish me. There were programs on television from morning until night. In our shiny brass mailbox in the lobby, we received ads on colored paper. The sliding glass doors of our apartment building would open when we approached. Each time they did this, I felt that we had been mistaken for somebody important.

My father, who had seemed pointless in India, had brought us to America and now we were rich. The fact that he had achieved this made him seem different, mysterious. All the time now he was saying things that revealed him as knowledgeable. In India, my mother had been the one who made all the decisions concerning Birju and me. Now I realized that my father, too, had opinions about us. This felt both surprising and intrusive, like being touched by a relative you don’t know well.

My father took Birju and me to a library. I had been in two libraries before then. One, in a small noisy room next to a barbershop, had had newspapers but not books and had been used primarily by people searching the employment ads. The other had been on the second floor of a temple, and had had books, but they were kept locked in glass-fronted cabinets.

The library in Queens was bigger than either of the ones I had seen. It had several rooms, and thousands of books. The librarian said that we could check out as many as we wanted. I did not believe this at first.

My father told Birju and me that he would give us fifty cents for each book we read. This bribing struck me as un-Indian and wrong. My mother had told us that Americans were afraid to demand things from their children. She’d said that this was because American parents did not care about their children and were unwilling to do the hard work of disciplining them. If my father wanted us to read, what he should do was threaten to beat us. I wondered whether my father had become too American during the year that he had lived alone.

I wanted to check out ten picture books. My father said, “You think I am going to give you money for such small books?”

My mother, Birju, and I had taken everything we could from the airplane: red Air India blankets, pillows with paper pillowcases, headsets, sachets of ketchup, packets of salt and pepper, airsickness bags. Birju and I used the blankets until they frayed and tore. Around that time, we started going to school.

I had a shy nature. “You are a tiger at home,” my mother said, “and a cat outside.” At school, I sat at the very back of the class, in the row closest to the door. Often I could not understand what my teacher was saying. I had studied English in India, but either my teacher spoke too quickly and used words I did not know or else I was so afraid that her words sounded garbled to my ears.

It was strange to be among so many whites. They all looked alike. When a boy spoke to me between periods, it would take me a moment to realize that I had talked to him before.

The school was three stories tall, with hallways that looped on themselves and stairways connecting the floors like a giant game of snakes and ladders. Not only could I not tell white people apart but I often got lost trying to find my classroom. Soon I became so afraid of getting lost in the vastness of the school that I wouldn’t leave the classroom when I had to use the toilet.

We had lunch in an asphalt yard surrounded by a high chain-link fence. Wheeled garbage cans were spread around the yard. I was often bullied. Sometimes a little boy would come up to me and tell me that I smelled bad. Then, if I said anything, a bigger boy would appear so suddenly that I couldn’t tell where he had come from. He’d knock me down, then stand over me, fists clenched, and demand, “You want to fight? You want to fight?” Sometimes boys surrounded me and shoved me back and forth, keeping me upright as a kind of game.

Often, standing in a corner of the asphalt yard, I would think, There has been a mistake. I am good at cricket. I am good at marbles. I am not the sort of boy who is pushed around.

For me, the two best things about America were television and the library. Every Saturday night, I watched “The Love Boat.” I looked at the women in their one-piece bathing suits and their high heels and imagined what it would be like when I was married. I decided that when I was married I would be very serious, and my silences would lead to misunderstandings between me and my wife. We would have a fight and later make up and kiss. She would be wearing a white swimsuit as we kissed.

Before coming to America, I had never read a book just to read it. At first, when I began doing so, whatever I read seemed obviously a lie. If a book said that a boy walked into a room, I was immediately aware that there was no boy and there was no room. Still, I read so much that I began to imagine myself in the books I read. I imagined being Pinocchio, swallowed by a whale. I wished to be inside a whale with a candle burning on a wooden crate, as in the illustration. Vanishing into books, I felt held. While I was at school or walking down the street, there seemed no end to the world; when I read a book or watched “The Love Boat,” the world felt simple and understandable.

Birju liked America much more than I did. In India, he had not been very popular. Here he made friends quickly. He was in seventh grade and his English was better than mine. Also, he was kinder than he had been in India. In India, there had been such competition, so many people offering bribes to get their children slightly better grades, that he was always on edge. Here, doing well seemed as simple as studying.

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My school was on the way to Birju’s and Birju used to walk me there every day. One morning, I started crying and told him about the bullying. He suggested that I talk to our parents. When I did not, he told them himself. My father came to school with me. I had to stand at the front of the class and point at all the boys who had shoved me or threatened me. After this, the bullying stopped. I had been angry that Birju had told our parents. I had not thought that this would make a difference. The fact that it did surprised me.

My mother took a job in a garment factory. The morning that she was to start, she came into the living room wearing jeans. I had never seen her in something form-fitting before. Birju and I were sitting on a mattress. “Your thighs look like turnips,” Birju said.

In India, when my father said that we should do something, we wouldn’t really start doing it until our mother had decided whether it should be done. In America, our parents had closer to equal authority. My father had all sorts of plans for us. Mostly, these involved ways to assimilate. He made us watch the news every evening. This was incredibly boring. We didn’t care that there were hostages in Iran or that there was a movie called “The Empire Strikes Back.” He also bought us tennis racquets and took us to Flushing Meadows Park. There, he made us hit tennis balls, because he believed that tennis was a sport for rich people.

My father was still irritable and suspicious, the way he had been in India, but he also had a certain confidence, as if no matter what happened he had done one thing that was uncontestably wonderful. “A green card is worth a million dollars,” he repeatedly told us.

My relationship with Birju also changed. In India, my mother had come home around the same time that we did. Now Birju was expected to take care of me until she returned from work. He was supposed to boil frozen corn for me and try to make me drink a glass of milk. Then he was supposed to sit with me and watch me do my homework while he did his. Before we came to America, I had not paid much attention to the fact that Birju was older than I was. I had thought that he was bigger, but not more mature. Now I began to understand that Birju dealt with more complicated things than I did.

One thing he had to deal with was my father’s desire for him to attend the Bronx High School of Science, where the son of a colleague had been accepted. To get into the Bronx High School of Science, you had to pass a difficult entrance exam. Every evening, after he had finished his homework, Birju sat and went through study guides, preparing for the test. His studying seemed so important that it was as if he were carrying the fate of the entire family.

Birju and I were sent to spend the summer with our father’s older sister, in Arlington, Virginia. She and our uncle lived in a small white house beside a wide road. The houses in Arlington had yards. The damp air there smelled of earth and greenery. Among the most noticeable things about Arlington was that the television networks were on different channels than in Queens.

In Arlington, while I got to go out and play whenever I wanted to, Birju was not allowed to leave the house until he had studied for five hours. When we returned to Queens, his studying duties only increased. Instead of two hours every week night, he had to study three. He worked all day on weekends, stopping only when the 8 P.M. TV shows started. Many nights, I fell asleep on my mattress to the sound of his pencil scratching away at our kitchen table.

Still, my mother felt that Birju was not studying hard enough. Often they fought. Once, she caught him asleep on the foam mattress in the room that my parents shared. He had claimed that he was going in there to study. Instead, she found him rolled onto his side, snoring.

She began shouting and called him a liar. Birju ran past her into the kitchen and returned with a knife. Standing before her, holding the knife by the handle and pointing it at his stomach, he said, “Kill me. Go ahead, kill me. I know that’s what you want.”

“Do some work instead of showing drama,” my mother said contemptuously.

The day of the exam finally came. On the subway to the test, I sat and Birju stood in front of me. I held one of his test-preparation books in my lap and checked his vocabulary. Most of the words I asked him he did not know. I started to panic. Birju, I began to see, was not going to do well. As I asked my questions and our mother and father listened, my voice grew quieter and quieter. I asked Birju what “rapscallion” meant. He guessed that it was a type of onion. When I told him what it was, he looked as if he were going to cry.

The exam took place in a large white cinder-block building that looked like a parking garage. As the test was going on, my parents and I walked back and forth on a sidewalk by a chain-link fence. The day was cold, gray, damp. Periodically, it drizzled. There were parked cars along the sidewalk, with waiting parents inside, and the windows of these cars grew foggy as we walked.

My father said, “These tests are for white people. How are we supposed to know what ‘pew’ means?”

“Don’t give me a headache,” my mother said. “I am worried enough.”

“Maybe he’ll do so well in the math and science portions that it will make up for the English.”

My stomach hurt. My chest was heavy. I had wanted Birju’s test day to come so that it would be over. Now that it was here, I wished that Birju had had more time.

Midway through the exam, there was a break. Birju came out to the sidewalk. He looked frightened. We surrounded him. We began feeding him oranges and almonds, to cool him and to give his brain strength.

“Just do your best,” my father said. “It is too late for anything else.”

Birju turned around and walked back toward the building.

Days went by. It was strange for Birju not to be studying. It was as if something were missing or wrong. Often Birju cried, “Mummy, I know I didn’t pass.”

A warm day came when I could tie my winter coat around my waist during lunch hour, then another one, like birds out of season. In Delhi, the fountains would be turned on in the evening and crowds would gather to watch.

Then the results arrived. Because Birju had said it so many times, I knew that an acceptance letter would come in a thick envelope, but the one Birju showed me was thin and white. Tears slid down his cheeks.

“Maybe you got in,” I murmured, trying to be comforting.

“Why do you think that?” Birju demanded angrily. He stared at me as if I might know something that he did not.

Our mother was at work. She had said that we shouldn’t open the envelope until she arrived, that we would take it to the temple and open it there.

My father arrived home after my mother. As soon as he did, Birju demanded that we go to the temple.

Inside the large chamber, my mother put a dollar in the wooden box before God Shiva. Then we went to each of the idols in turn. Normally, we only pressed our hands together before each idol and bowed our heads. This time, we knelt and did a full prayer. After we had prayed before all the idols, we went back and knelt before the family of God Ram. Birju sat between our parents.

“You open it, Mummy.”

My mother tore off one side of the envelope. She shook out a sheet of paper. “Congratulations!” the letter began. Birju had made it!

“See. I told you we should open it at the temple.”

We all leaped to our feet and hugged.

With her arms still around Birju, my mother looked at me over his shoulder. “Tomorrow, we start preparing you,” she said.

We began to be invited to people’s houses for lunch, for dinner, for tea, so that Birju could meet these people’s children. Back then, because immigrants tended to be young, and the Indian immigration to America had only recently begun, there were very few Indian children Birju’s age, and other parents were always looking for role models.

We took the subway all over Queens, the Bronx, even to Manhattan. We travelled almost every weekend, and being asked to visit made my mother very happy.

“They have a girl they want you to marry,” she said once, to tease Birju.

“For me,” my father said, “there is one thing only.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “Dowry.” The enormous relief of Birju’s success had made my father cheerful as well.

The triumph of getting into his school changed Birju. He sauntered. Entering a room, he appeared to be leaning back. When I spoke to him, he would look at me as if to ask how anyone could say something so foolish. One time when he looked at me this way, I blurted, “You have bad breath.” I felt foolish for having pitied him.

My mother acted as if everything Birju said were smart. One afternoon, as he sat tilting back in a chair at the kitchen table, one skinny arm reaching out to touch the wall so that he did not fall, he told our mother, “You should be a toll-booth collector.”

“Why?” She was standing by the stove, boiling frozen corn.

“In a toll booth, people will only see your top.”

My mother had been talking about trying to get a government job. She did not want to wear a uniform, though, because her hips embarrassed her.

She laughed and turned to me. “Your brother is a genius,” she said.

I wondered sometimes if my parents loved Birju more than they loved me. But I did not think so. They bothered him and corrected him so much more than they corrected me.

We went to Arlington again in the summer. By now, after two years in America, I had grown chubby. I could grip my belly and squeeze it. Birju was tall and thin. He had a little mustache and tendrils of hair on the sides of his cheeks.

Once more, I lay on my aunt’s sofa and watched TV. Once more, the TV channels were different from the ones in Queens, and they made me feel that I was living far from home.

Most days, Birju went swimming at a pool in a nearby apartment building. One afternoon in August, I was stretched out on the sofa watching “Gilligan’s Island” when the telephone rang. The shades were drawn and the room was dim. My aunt answered the phone. After she hung up, she came into the doorway. “Birju has had an accident,” she said. “Get up.” She motioned with a hand for me to rise. I went reluctantly. By the time we got back from the pool, “Gilligan’s Island” would likely be over.

The apartment building with the pool was tall and brown. There was a small parking lot beside the pool and an ambulance was stopped there, with a crowd of white people surrounding it. Being near so many whites made me nervous. Perhaps they would be angry at us for causing trouble. Birju should not have done whatever he had done.

My aunt said, “You wait.” She had arthritis in one hip and she pushed into the crowd with a lurching peg-leg gait.

I remained at the edge of the crowd and now, alone, I felt even more embarrassed. A minute passed and then two. My aunt came back, hobbling quickly. Her face looked scared.

“Go home,” she said. “I have to go to the hospital.”

I walked, head down, along the sidewalk. I was irritated. Birju had got into the Bronx High School of Science and now he was going to be in the hospital and our mother would feel bad for him and give him a gift.

As I walked, I wondered if Birju had stepped on a nail. I wondered if he was dead. This was thrilling. If he was dead, I would get to be the only son.

The sun pressed itself on me from above and also, its heat reflecting off the sidewalk, from below. I thought I should probably cry. It seemed like the right thing to do.

I imagined myself alone in the house. I imagined Birju in the hospital and my aunt there. I imagined the fall, with Birju at the Bronx High School of Science and me at my ordinary school. Then the tears came.

Just as I had expected, “Gilligan’s Island” was over.

I lay back down on the sofa. I watched TV until five, when the news started. I picked up a book and propped it on my stomach. I read for a while, but I was aware that my aunt was gone and I was alone in the house. Something exciting was occurring. I felt as if I were missing out on an adventure.

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Around eight, my uncle arrived, in his dark pants and short-sleeved shirt, with his triangle of wispy white hair. He stood by the sink, drinking water from a glass. He still had his shoes on. For him to be wearing shoes in the kitchen was so strange that it made the kitchen feel unreal, like a display in a furniture store.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

He patted my head. “We don’t know.”

About ten-thirty, my uncle drove us to the bus station. We were going to pick up my mother. The fact that my mother was coming made what had occurred seem very serious. I began to be scared.

When my mother walked through the bus station’s automatic doors, her hair was loose, her face flattened with fear. She was wearing a yellow sari and carrying a black duffelbag.

Seeing my mother, I worried that she might think I was bad for not crying. I walked up to her. She looked down, as if she didn’t recognize me. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve cried already.”

The hospital room was bright and white and noisy. There was the whirr of the machines. There were beeps. There was a loud motorized rumble, almost like that of a generator.

Birju was lying on a bed with railings. The railings reminded me of a crib. There were poles on wheels all around the bed. Bags hung from the poles and there were also machines bolted to the poles. It was as if Birju were lying amid many clotheslines. He had a plastic mask over his mouth and nose. It looked like what fighter pilots wear in thin air. His eyes were wide open, as if in panic. He appeared to be staring up at some invisible thing that was pressing down on his chest.

Birju had dived into the swimming pool. He had struck his head on the pool’s concrete bottom and lain there stunned for three minutes. Water had surged down his throat and into his lungs. His lungs had peeled away from the insides of his chest.

My uncle carried a large cardboard box into the room that Birju and I had shared, and placed it against a wall. My aunt and my mother draped a white sheet over the box. They taped postcards of various gods on the wall, so that these appeared to be gazing at the altar. On the altar itself, they placed a spoon and, in the bowl of the spoon, a wick soaked in clarified butter. They put a wad of dough on the altar and stuck incense sticks into the dough. They did all this quickly and quietly. When they spoke, it was in a whisper.

The ceiling lights were turned off. The flame in the spoon and the smoke rising from it sent shadows shaking over the walls. I lay on a strip of foam beneath one of the windows. My aunt and my mother stretched themselves face down before the altar. They sang prayers. I kept being woken by their singing. I understood that it was proper to pray in moments like this. Still, I knew that Birju was going to be all right and wouldn’t it be better for everyone to get some sleep?

Around 4 A.M., the ceiling lights were turned on. I sat up. The air was thick with incense. My mother was standing before the altar, her hands pressed together. She was wearing a blue silk sari and a gold necklace, and she looked as if she were going to a wedding.

A little later, when we were about to go back to the hospital, we stood in the driveway in the dark. I looked up at the stars. There were thousands of them, some of them bright, some of them dim. I suddenly had the sense that what was happening was a mistake, that we had been given somebody else’s life.

In the weeks that followed, I spent most of each day sitting by Birju’s bed, chanting to him from the Ramayana. The book was a large hardcover wrapped in saffron cloth. Some of the pages had grease stains from the butter used in prayers, and I could look through the stains and see the letters on the next page. Every time I opened the book, there was a puff of incense smell from its having spent so many years near altars.

I had never prayed so much before, every day, hour after hour, until my throat ached and even my tongue and my gums hurt. I had not believed in God before. Now, praying as if it were my job, I began to think that there had to be a God. People weren’t stupid. My mother wouldn’t be making me pray this way, people all over the world wouldn’t be building temples and going on pilgrimages, if there weren’t some benefit to it. It was strange that there was a God. I imagined that He was far away, busy, impatient, not especially interested in the many people who wanted His help, but obligated for some reason to hear our prayers.

Time passed. I watched my mother cut Birju’s fingernails. She seemed scared to do it. “Is this all right?” she asked him. I watched her and felt as if I were dreaming.

Birju had his oxygen mask removed. Many of the wheeled poles were taken away. Now he looked the way he always had, except that he seemed to be sleeping with his eyes open. A doctor told us that oxygen deprivation had destroyed his corneas and he couldn’t see. It seemed disloyal to believe this.

Birju moaned, he yawned, he coughed, but his eyes were like those of a blind person, lost in thought. He responded to sounds. If there was a loud noise, he would turn his head in the direction of the noise. Then he’d roll it back and just lie there. Occasionally, he had a seizure. His teeth clamped shut and squeaked against each other. His body stiffened, his hips rose off the bed, and the bed began to rattle. Often, standing by the bed and reading to him, or holding a comic book open before him and saying, “See,” I felt such love for my brother that I wished I had known all along how much he mattered to me. I looked at him through the railings and wondered what to do. ♦

Akhil Sharma is the author of “Family Life,” which is now out in paperback. He is an assistant professor in the English department at Rutgers-Newark.